Hurricane Dorian unleashed massive flooding across the Bahamas on Monday, pummeling the islands with so much wind and water that authorities urged people to find floatation devices and grab hammers to break out of their attics if necessary. “We are in the midst of a historic tragedy,” Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said in announcing the fatalities. The fearsome Category 4 storm slowed almost to a standstill as it shredded roofs, hurled cars and forced even rescue crews to take shelter until the onslaught passed.

Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts issued an emergency declaration for the state, citing forecasts of up to 2 feet (0.61 m) of snow and high winds that are expected to make travel “difficult to impossible” on roads. “Nebraskans should watch the forecast closely in the coming days and be prepared for severe weather events in conjunction with potential historic flooding,” Ricketts said in the declaration. “Widespread and extremely dangerous flooding will continue today and tonight,” the National Weather Service office in Omaha, Nebraska, said on Friday in a statement.

Police in Australia responded to reports of a man screaming "why don't you die?" by dispatching multiple units to a home in Perth. But officers were soon told to stand down when they found a man who “had only been trying to kill a spider", according to the police log published online. The alarm was raised when a passer-by heard a screaming child and a man repeatedly shouting. In a tweet on Wednesday morning Wanneroo police shared their account of the unusual incident. It cited the man’s “serious fear” of spiders, and added that there had been no injuries at the scene apart from those sustained by the spider. The now-deleted tweet by Wanneroo police The tweet read: “Multiple police units responded lights and sirens to the incident this morning. Never a dull moment for the Police!” A police spokesman, Samuel Dinnison, said: "It's just one of those jobs where you go expecting to see one thing and see another." He confirmed the tweet was later deleted from Twitter because it pictured internal police communication systems and because “there were just some typos in it, things like that”. The man was reported to have apologised “for the inconvenience” he had caused. A similar incident occurred in 2015 , when police in Sydney found a man screaming “I’m going to kill you, you’re dead” at a spider in his home.

The height of the more than 90-year-old volcano has been reduced to about 110 meters from 338 meters after eruptions intensified in the past week, according to the Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation. The eruptions also eroded the mass volume of the volcano to about 40 to 70 million cubic meters from 180 million earlier, it said. The shrinking of the volcano in height and size reduces the risk of another landslide leading to a tsunami, Antonius Ratdomopurbo, secretary of Indonesian energy ministry’s geology agency, told reporters in Jakarta on Saturday.

The gunshots that tore through a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday first triggered lockdowns in houses of worship across the city. Following the deadliest attack ever on the Jewish community in the United States, residents rushed to provide comfort, give blood, organize vigils and bring therapy dogs to a Jewish community center. The Tree of Life synagogue, where 11 people were killed by a gunman who burst into a morning service, is home to three congregations in Squirrel Hill, the heart of Pittsburgh’s tight-knit Jewish community.